Free Blood Canticle by Anne Rice Page B

breasts and hips, the broad lace hem just above her ankles.
    Quinn took out his pocket handkerchief and wiped the caked blood off her cheeks. He kissed her, and she fell to kissing him, and for a moment they were just lost to each other, kissing and kissing, like two long graceful cats licking at each other.
    He picked her up off her feet and wouldn’t stop kissing her. They were both of them purring. He wanted so badly to drink just a taste of her blood.
    I slumped down in the chair at Quinn’s desk.
    I listened to the house. Clatter of dishes in the sink, Jasmine talking. Cyndy, the Nurse, was there crying at the sight of Aunt Queen’s room; and where was Quinn’s mother, Patsy? Clem out front waiting for us with that big car, yes, right, don’t frighten her by carrying her through the air; take the car.
    In a daze of small considerations, I watched her slip on the silk dress. The silk dress appeared handmade with embroidered cuffs and a tight embroidered collar that Quinn clasped at the back of her neck. It hung to her ankles. It looked divine on her—like a gown rather than a dress. She was a barefoot princess. Oh yeah, that’s a cliché, well then, so is a fulsome and comely young woman. Shove it.
    She put on a pair of slightly scuffed little white slippers, the kind you can buy in any drugstore, the ones she’d obviously worn over here, and after she put her head back and tossed her hair, she was almost complete. It was vampire hair now, and it needed no real brushing, each strand fighting with the strand next to it, the whole voluminous and gleaming, her forehead high and well proportioned, with eyebrows divinely set, and then she flashed on me. I’m still here, guys.
    “It’s tricky,” she said gently, as if she didn’t want to be rude to me. “He knows you have a cameo in your pocket, and so I know because I can read his thoughts.”
    “Oh, so that’s what I’ve done here,” I said, laughing under my breath. “I forgot about the cameo.” I gave it to Quinn. I could foresee this triangular telepathy being something of a nightmare.
    Yes, I’d wanted them free to read each other’s thoughts, so why the Hell was I jealous?
    Towering over her, he pinned the cameo carefully in the center of the embroidered white collar. It looked old and fine.
    Then in an anxious whisper he put a question to her.
    “You wouldn’t wear Aunt Queen’s high-heel shoes, would you?”
    She went into a riot of soft laughter. So did I.
    Till her dying day, Aunt Queen had apparently gone about in breakneck high heels with ankle straps and open toes, some covered in rhinestones or, for all I knew, real diamonds. She’d had on such wondrous shoes when I made her acquaintance.
    One of the enduring ironies of her death was that she had been in her bare stocking feet when she suffered the fall that killed her. But that was the evildoing of Goblin, who had deliberately startled her and even pushed her.
    So the shoes were innocent and there were probably piles of them in her closets downstairs.
    But slap together the image of Mona, the tramp kid, in saddle oxfords, and any vision of Aunt Queen’s heels, and it was uproariously funny. Why would Mona do such a thing as that to herself? And if you knew how much Quinn noticed women’s high heels—namely Jasmine’s and Aunt Queen’s, it was twice as uproariously funny.
    Mona was stuck someplace between vampire trance and total love, gazing into Quinn’s earnest face trying to figure this.
    “All right, Quinn, I’ll try her shoes,” she said, “if you want me to.” Now that was pure transnatural female.
    He was on the phone to Jasmine in an instant. Bring upstairs Aunt Queen’s finest big white satin wrapper—one of the full-length articles with the ostrich feather trim, and a pair of her new heels, very glittery, and hurry.
    It didn’t require a vampire’s hearing to pick up Jasmine’s answer:
    “Lawd! You’re going to make that sick girl put on those things? Have you